When Victoria Switzer awoke on a cold night in March, her dog was staring out the window at the flame roaring from a natural-gas-drilling rig 2,000 feet behind her house. She remembers trees silhouetted in a demonic dance as the plume burned off gas that had been building up under her land.
She discovered later that such flaring can occur when Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. and dozens more companies drill for gas trapped in shale rock. The deposits, stretching from Texas to New York, and as far away as Australia and China, represent what may be the biggest energy bonanza in decades — one that Switzer, 57, recalls thinking the Earth isn’t surrendering without a fight.
Switzer, a retired teacher in Pennsylvania, is on the front line of a shale gas frenzy that’s dividing communities, creating millionaires and shaking up global energy markets.
Companies from India’s Reliance Industries Ltd. to Japan’s Mitsui & Co. are spending billions to dislodge natural gas from a band of Pennsylvania shale — sedimentary rock composed of mud, quartz and calcite.
Shale gas proponents, led by 91-year-old oil-patch billionaire George Mitchell, who invented the process to extract it, says the U.S. should plumb all forms of natural gas. That would help unhook the nation from coal and foreign petroleum.
Gas is two-thirds cheaper than oil and greener. It produces 117 pounds of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy compared with 156 for gasoline and 205 for coal.
Shale gas has plenty of detractors. Environmentalists say fracking, a process in which drillers blast water into a well to shatter rock and unleash the gas, threatens pristine watersheds.
Dish, a hamlet of 180 residents north of Fort Worth, Texas, has almost as many wells, compressors and pipelines as people.
Last year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality found benzene, which it classifies as a carcinogen, at 10,700 times the safe long-term exposure limit next to a well 6 miles west of town on which a valve had been left open.
“We have children, old people, pregnant women,” Mayor Calvin Tillman says. “They’re not supposed to be subjected to toxins.”
Switzer, who moved to Dimock Township, Pa., with her husband, Jimmy, in 2004 to build a $350,000 dream home, had no idea how shale gas would consume her village of 1,400.
She says she found so much methane in her well that her water bubbled like Alka-Seltzer.
Impact on homeowners
Norma Fiorentino, shown above in her Dimock, Pa., home, says methane in her well blew an 8-inch-thick concrete slab off the top.
The $180 bonus Cabot Oil & Gas paid to drill on Victoria Switzer’s 7.2 acres and the $900 in royalties she gets each month don’t compensate, she says.
“I feel like one of the Indians who sold Manhattan for beads and baubles,” she says.
Photo by Daniel Acker, Bloomberg News
